3ds Max SDK Annual Survey and Highlights from Last Year's Results

Please do take the time to provide us with your input: it’s one of the most direct ways to influence the direction of the Autodesk products you customize or for which you develop applications. Our engineering teams take this feedback very seriously when prioritizing the APIs to expose over the coming releases of our software. Also if you (optionally) provide your email address in the survey, you'll recieve a copy of the results once they’ve been compiled.

Last Year Results

Last year we had a lot of useful feedback which we did our best to act on.

Some highlights:

91% of respondents said they would like access to 3ds Max's PDBs (Program Database Files). Also related was the fact that the feature that most people considered important or very important was "ease of debugging plug-ins". So we have made 3ds Max 2012 PDB available on a symbol server (see http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/chris/debug_symbol_server_for_3ds_max_2012).

63% of respondents said that code samples are a very important resource (second in ranking after the SDK reference) and 52% (third in ranking) said that the how-to samples were a very important resource, so we added five new code samples to the code community: http://code.google.com/p/3ds-max-dev/downloads/list with more in the works.

74% of respondents said that the overall satisfaction was Good, Very Good, or Excellent.

60% of respondents stated that Google was an important resource for using the 3ds Max SDK. Now you can Google 3ds Max SDK docs. Try entering the following into Google search engine site:download.autodesk.com/global/docs/3dsmaxsdk2012/en_us/ IParamBlock.

Some lowlights:

92% of respondents said that they would like free access to test scripts that perform basic validation of plug-ins. We were not able to get to this issue, but acknowledge that is important.

79% of respondents said that the 3ds Max SDK is somewhat to very hard to use. We still have a lot of work to do here.

Only 5% of respondents said that the overall satisfaction with the SDK was excellent.

26% of respondents said that the overall satisfaction with the SDK was bad or very bad. This is higher than we would like.

I'm an internal MaxScript developer, and i find i cannot complete this survey because it is mainly designed towards SDK developers, i don't know if that is the goal, just want to point that out.
Cheers!